rven woodwork
and red lacquer. They have tapering roofs, one above another, till they,
too, end in a golden spire full of little bells with tongues. As the
wind blows the tongues move to and fro, and the air is full of music, so
faint, so clear, like 'silver stir of strings in hollow shells.'

In most of these shrines there are statues of the great teacher, cut in
white alabaster, glimmering whitely in the lustrous shadows there
within; and in one shrine is the great bell. Long ago we tried to take
this great bell; we tried to send it home as a war trophy, this bell
stolen from their sacred place, but we failed. As it was being put on
board a ship, it slipped and fell into the river into the mud, where the
fierce tides are ever coming and going. And when all the efforts of our
engineers to raise it had failed, the Burmese asked: 'The bell, our
bell, is there in the water. You cannot get it up. You have tried and
you have failed. If we can get it up, may we have it back to hang in our
pagoda as our own again?' And they were told, with a laugh, perhaps,
that they might; and so they raised it up again, the river giving back
to them what it had refused to us, and they took and hung it where it
used to be. There it is now, and you may hear it when you go, giving out
a long, deep note, the beat of the pagoda's heart.

There are many trees, too, about the pagoda platform--so many, that seen
far off you can only see the trees and the pagoda towering above them.
Have not trees been always sacred things? Have not all religions been
glad to give their fanes the glory and majesty of great trees?

You may look from the pagoda platform over the whole country, over the
city and the river and the straight streets; and on the other side you
may see the long white lakes and little hills covered with trees. It is
a very beautiful place, this pagoda, and it is steeped in an odour of
holiness, the perfume of the thousand thousand prayers that have been
prayed there, of the thousand thousand holy thoughts that have been
thought there.

The pagoda platform is always full of people kneeling, saying over and
over the great precepts of their faith, trying to bring into their
hearts the meaning of the teaching of him of whom this wonderful pagoda
represents the tomb. There are always monks there passing to and fro, or
standing leaning on the pillars of the shrines; there are always a crowd
of people climbing up and down the long steps that lea